Bad Mother

A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace

By Ayelet Waldman

(Doubleday; $24.95; 214 pages)

Is Ayelet Waldman truly guileless, or are her frank personal confessions calculatedly provocative and attention-grabbing? I couldn't help wondering as I made my way, wide-eyed, from revelations about the dozens of men she had sex with in her teens to well-meaning but bumbling explanations about why she half hopes her sons turn out to be gay.

Waldman, the author of seven Mommy-Track Mysteries and two literary novels concerned with domestic themes and what she has called "the perfect-mother myth," says she wrote "Bad Mother" to address "the perils and joys of trying to be a decent mother in a world intent on making you feel like a bad one." Waldman's tone in these 18 essays is often defensive - not surprising given her legal training at Harvard Law School (where Barack Obama was a classmate) and her experience as a former public defender. Many, perhaps unwittingly, are also inflammatory - and bound to stimulate ferocious discussion in the online chat rooms Waldman frequents.

This is not the first time Waldman has opened herself up to what she calls "the Bad Mother cops." She was widely criticized after confessing in a New York Times column to loving her husband, novelist Michael Chabon, more than their four children. (What she meant, she explains reasonably enough here, is that, unlike so many mothers, she hasn't refocused her passion from her husband onto her children. She also bristles at the idea that to be a good mother you must be self-abnegating.)

In a 2005 column for Salon.com, Waldman noted "a confessional impulse, a compulsive need to haul open the tattered edges of my emotional raincoat and expose the nasty parts lurking beneath." In "Bad Mother," she explicitly connects this "inability to resist the impulse to reveal inappropriately intimate details of one's life" with her bipolar disorder.

It's a question, of course, of what you consider "inappropriately intimate." One person's bracing honesty is another's "over-sharing." Who knows what confessions Waldman has suppressed? While she's effusive about her husband's admirable qualities, she's irreproachably tactful about what goes on behind their - locked, she tells us - bedroom door.

Waldman claims she hasn't betrayed her children, now ages 6 through 14, by writing "Bad Mother," and in fact sought their permission before publication, making "sure they're not uncomfortable and don't feel exposed." It's debatable how informed and free a young child's consent can be. Waldman feels her book is justified anyway, because "the very writing of this book embodies my approach to motherhood," which, she explains, is telling the truth "even - no, especially - when the truth is difficult."

Waldman is obviously a devoted mother. And it seems reasonable that someday she may want to tell her children about her anguished decision to abort her third pregnancy after equivocal amnio results, or - as a cautionary tale - about her unhappy sexual initiation at 14 with a 22-year-old Israeli soldier while on a kibbutz, and her subsequent sluttiness (her derogatory term) until she met their father. ("I cannot recall ever rejecting an advance, and I know I never felt good afterward," she confesses.)

But being confronted with such stark truths prematurely, or realizing that friends, teachers, casual acquaintances and total strangers are privy to them, too, seems like an exercise in childhood mortification.

Some of Waldman's confessions, such as her account of her older son's learning disabilities and her own difficulties keeping her ego out of her "unrealistically high expectations" may prove helpful to other parents plagued by feelings of inadequacy - but it could also be painful for the poor boy to read about his "impulse control issues."

Other writers have mined the self-deprecating bad mother vein, including Anne Lamott in her delightful "Operating Instructions" (1993) and Rachel Cusk in her decidedly unrosy "A Life's Work." But - never mind keeping her ego out of childrearing - Waldman seems to have more trouble keeping her foot out of her mouth. She writes that although she's not Buddhist, she wishes she were "a more mindful mother." More thoughtful before she goes public, whether online or in print, might be a good starting point.